Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 1534 – Public Intelligence Blog

India-Russia-Afghanistan: India, Russia and Afghanistan quietly have created a triangular arrangement for providing arms aid to Afghanistan after NATO withdraws. None of the countries have made an official announcement. Only a small number of news services, including The Moscow Times and Pakistani newspapers, have published articles about it.

The arrangement was finalized in February when an India team visited Moscow, but it had been under discussion during the past year. It was one of the discussion items when President Karzai visited India last December.

Under the agreement, smaller arms such as light artillery and mortars will be provided by Russia and moved to Afghanistan from the north, while India paid Russia for the equipment. An inventory of Russian-made equipment in Afghanistan has been completed. Afghanistan has presented India with a list of requirements and Russia reportedly has made one or more initial shipments.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: Afghanistan-Russia-India, Good-Bye ISAF”

2014/04/302014/04/30

Mini-Me: An Alternative Favorable View of Putin – A Citizen Challenges US Government and US Media on Simple Truth

Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

Huh?

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are first class intellects who researched and wrote a truly important book on Afghanistan's modern political history (Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story), which includes a detailed, inside account of the Carter/Brzezinski administration's disinformation campaign—prosecuted by our news media—regarding the Afghan government's invitation of the Soviet military into the country. Characterized as an “invasion”, it soon became our excuse for funding the Mujahideen—the Islamic fundamentalists who are now our sworn enemy and who have wreaked havoc on a very promising democracy. Elizabeth just sent me the below report about Vladimir Putin written by a friend she consider svery reliable. I have no way to way evaluate what Ms. Tennison says in her report but she presents a very stark counter to the demonization campaign towards Putin currently underway in the New York Times and other Western media.

Dear Ones,

We’d like to introduce you to Sharon Tennison who has written an analysis of Vladimir Putin that every American needs to know. Sharon, who lives in California, has been in a unique position for over three decades to grasp a ground truth about Russia and Putin. She created the Center for Citizen Initiative, that brought her to the Soviet Union in 1983 as a “citizen diplomat.

” She recently wrote a book about her experience titled, The Power of Impossible Ideas: ordinary citizens' extraordinary efforts to avert international crisis. It is “the history of Russia’s last three turbulent decades as observed by naive American citizens who traveled there in 1983 searching for keys to end the nuclear arms race… their skirmishes with the CIA, FBI, KGB and FSB, beingarrested, put in jail, in addition to creating unique programs to help Russian citizens survive the dissolution of the USSR and to begin recreating themselves after the fall of Communism…finding themselves inside the Kremlin, the White House, and the U.S. Congress.”

Once you’ve had a chance to read RUSSIA REPORT: PUTIN included below, we hope you will comment on Sharon’s observations in your next posting, blog or op-ed. Sharon can be reached for comments or interviews at sharon@ccisf.org.

Thanks much for your time.

Kindest regards,

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

RUSSIA REPORT: PUTIN

By Sharon Tennison

Posted Sunday April 20, 2014

Friends and colleagues,

As the Ukraine situation has worsened, unconscionable misinformation and hype is being poured on Russia and Vladimir Putin. Journalists and pundits must scour Internet and thesauruses to come up with fiendish new epithets to describe both. Wherever I make presentations across America, the first ominous question during Q&A is always, “What about Putin?”

It's time to share my thoughts which follow:

Putin obviously has his faults and makes mistakes. Based on my earlier experience with him, and the experiences of trusted people, including U.S. officials who have worked closely with him over a period of years, Putin most likely is a straight, reliable and exceptionally inventive man––a leader who quietly labors under mounds of accusations and myths that have been steadily leveled at and about him since he became Russia's second president.

I've stood by silently watching the demonization of Putin grow since it began in the early 2000s –– I pondered on computer my thoughts and concerns, hoping eventually to include them in a book (which was published in 2011). The book explains my observations more thoroughly than this article. Like others who have had direct experience with this formerly unknown man, I've tried to avoid being labeled as a “Putin apologist”––but to no avail. If one is even neutral about this Russian leader, they are considered “soft on Putin” by pundits, news hounds and average citizens who get their news from CNN, Fox and MSNBC.

I don't pretend to be an expert, just a program developer in the USSR and Russia for the past 30 years. But during this time, I've have had far more direct, on ground contact with Russians of all stripes across 11 time zones than any of the Western reporters or for that matter any of Washington's officials. I've been in country long enough to ponder Russian history and culture deeply, to study their psychology and conditioning, and to understand the marked differences between American and Russian mentalities which so complicate our political relations with their leaders. As with personalities in a family or a civic club or in a city hall, it takes understanding and compromise to be able to create workable relationships when basic conditionings are different. Washington has been notoriously disinterested in understanding these differences and attempting to meet Russia halfway.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: An Alternative Favorable View of Putin – A Citizen Challenges US Government and US Media on Simple Truth”

2014/04/302014/04/30

Jon Rappoport: Water Time — Surf Travel Diary of a Madman

Cultural Intelligence

Hollywood writer goes on the road with JFK assassination evidence

This is about a relentless film. A film that doesn’t care what happens when false reality is ripped away. A film that actually does what every person who knows the truth wants to do.

This is a film you should see. It’s called Water Time, and if you go to banditobooks.com, you can watch it for free, by signing up on Allan Weisbecker’s email list.

Allan is the director and the star of Water Time. He made a good living writing for Hollywood into the mid-90s (Miami Vice, Crime Story), when he quit the scene to live a different kind of life.

A much, much different kind of life….that culminated in going on the road to see what had happened to America. Driving his truck, with his dog Honey, with his surfboard, with his laptop, on which he’d stashed compelling evidence that key events in modern American history had resulted in a shadow takeover of the country. A coup d’etat.

That’s one of the subjects of the film.

It’s about a man who knows the truth and wants to talk about it with average Americans on camera, before your eyes. It’s about a man who makes his own frontier, who mourns the loss of his childhood friend who died in Vietnam, a war made into a horror through the assassination of JFK.

This film forgets all about the smooth kind of Hollywood that, when all is said and done, ruffles no feathers. Water Time barrels into the present American malaise and explodes the barriers and the veils and membranes between vital information, life-changing information, and American people who are just “living their lives.”

Weisbecker sits down with them, opens his laptop, and shows them evidence that the JFK hit was a conspiracy. He shows them a few of the very strange things that happened on 9/11. He doesn’t back down. He pushes forward with uncompromising logic.

Continue reading “Jon Rappoport: Water Time — Surf Travel Diary of a Madman”

2014/04/302014/04/30

Chris Hedges: The Crime of Peaceful Protest

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement

The Crime of Peaceful Protest

Truthdig.com, 27 April 2014

NEW YORK—Cecily McMillan, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled, sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing Judge Ronald A. Zweibel in Room 1116 at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The judge seems to have alternated between boredom and rage throughout the trial, now three weeks old. He has repeatedly thrown caustic barbs at her lawyers and arbitrarily shut down many of the avenues of defense. Friday was no exception.

The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest. But the judge, who has issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan’s lawyers from speaking to the press, was visibly impatient, snapping, “This debate is going to end.” He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said “is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute” the prosecution’s charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. “I’m totally handicapped,” Stolar lamented to Zweibel.

The trial of McMillan, 25, is one of the last criminal cases originating from the Occupy protest movement. It is also one of the most emblematic. The state, after the coordinated nationwide eradication of Occupy encampments, has relentlessly used the courts to harass and neutralize Occupy activists, often handing out long probation terms that come with activists’ forced acceptance of felony charges. A felony charge makes it harder to find employment and bars those with such convictions from serving on juries or working for law enforcement. Most important, the long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism.

Read full article (3 screens)

2014/04/302014/04/30

Tom Atlee: Upshifting Empathy — and Burying Nuclear Code in a Human Who Must be Killed by the President Before Using…

Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

Upshifting our limited empathy to face Big Issues

Our empathy is built in us with a kind of disconnect which can make it hard to usefully integrate our feelings with our reason. This has profound implications for the climate crisis, the possibilities of nuclear war, and many other “extinction level” issues. A leading negotiator offers a provocative story to stimulate our thinking about this, to which I add some videos.

. . . . . . .

Given that context, I stumbled yesterday on the little story below, written by the late Roger Fisher, co-author of the watershed negotiation classic Getting to Yes: How to Negotiate Agreement Without Giving In. His story was written 33 years ago at the height of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union when many people – myself included – felt that we were on the edge of a global thermonuclear war which would have quite thoroughly wiped out all higher forms of life on earth – and which could have happened at a moment’s notice, even by accident (and still could).

. . . . . . .

FROM “PREVENTING NUCLEAR WAR” BY ROGER FISHER
BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, MARCH 1981

My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.

When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.“

Read full post with other links.

2014/04/302014/04/30

Patrick Meier: Operational Checklist for Flying UAVs in Humanitarian Settings

Drones & UAVs, Innovation, Sources (Info/Intel)

An Operational Check-List for Flying UAVs in Humanitarian Settings

The Humanitarian UAV Network (UAViators) has taken off much faster than I expected. More than 240 members in 32 countries have joined the network since it’s launch just a few weeks ago.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the number of humanitarian organizations that got in touch with me right after the launch. Many of them are just starting to explore this space. And I found it refreshing that every single one of them considers the case for humanitarian UAVs to be perfectly obvious. Almost all of the groups also mentioned how they would have made use of UAVs in recent disasters. Some are even taking steps now to set up rapid-response UAV teams.

My number one priority after launching the network was to start working on a Code of Conduct to guide the use of UAVs in humanitarian settings—the only one of it’s kind as far as I know. While I had initially sought to turn this Code of Conduct into a check-list, it became clear from the excellent feedback provided by members and the Advisory Board that we needed two separate documents. So my RA’s and I have created a more general Code of Conduct along with a more detailed operational check-list for flying UAVs in humanitarian settings. You’ll find the check-list here. Big thanks to Advisory Board member Gene Robinson for letting me draw on his excellent book for this check-list. Both the Code of Conduct and Check-List will continue to be updated on a monthly basis, so please do chime in and help us improve them.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Operational Checklist for Flying UAVs in Humanitarian Settings”

2014/04/302014/04/30

Owl: “Suicided” Bankers Worth Over Half a Trillion in Life Insurance, Payable to Banks, Not Families — JP Morgan in Spotlight

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Corruption

Maybe They are Killing Bankers for Their Life Insurance?

Criminality can take many forms, based on the breadth and depth of human depravity and pathological ingenuity. Applying life insurance to pay off corporations when a current or former employee dies, in this case for bankers, a life insurance program called BOLI (bank-owned life insurance), has to represent a new low in corporate psychopathological viciousness and depravity in the corporate pursuit of money at all costs, even that of life itself, as long as is another's life and not that of schemers who pursue such routes to profit themselves. To paraphrase a famous country song, Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Bankers if you them to have a long life:

“It doesn’t get any more Orwellian than this: Wall Street mega banks crash the U.S. financial system in 2008. Hundreds of thousands of financial industry workers lose their jobs. Then, beginning late last year, a rash of suspicious deaths start to occur among current and former bank employees. Next we learn that four of the Wall Street mega banks likely hold over $680 billion face amount of life insurance on their workers, payable to the banks, not the families. We ask their Federal regulator for the details of this life insurance under a Freedom of Information Act request and we’re told the information constitutes “trade secrets.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the life expectancy of a 25 year old male with a Bachelor’s degree or higher as of 2006 was 81 years of age. But in the past five months, five highly educated JPMorgan male employees in their 30s and one former employee aged 28, have died under suspicious circumstances, including three of whom allegedly leaped off buildings – a statistical rarity even during the height of the financial crisis in 2008. There is one other major obstacle to brushing away these deaths as random occurrences – they are not happening at JPMorgan’s closest peer bank – Citigroup. Both JPMorgan and Citigroup are global financial institutions with both commercial banking and investment banking operations. Their employee counts are similar – 260,000 employees for JPMorgan versus 251,000 for Citigroup.

Continue reading “Owl: “Suicided” Bankers Worth Over Half a Trillion in Life Insurance, Payable to Banks, Not Families — JP Morgan in Spotlight”